Snow Fell Ivory
by Vashagud
Summary: She began to lose herself in the starlight, and he'd gone by firelight. It just takes some music to know it.  Cloti. Angst.


His teeth bare themselves, white, against the dark backdrop of her room when she mentions offhandedly to him that she might want to get a piano. He looks away, and quickly brings his mouth tightly together, but she still remembers that expression on his face, and wouldn't have forgotten it as soon as she did if not for the music already playing in her head.

The white skin around his knuckles burns red when he clenches his hand the moment she signs the delivery papers and looks out to the large box on the front step. She notices things like that because he doesn't often give her much to go on. A few words here, a soft brush of his fingers at the curve of her back there, just as he's sliding by her to leave through the front door.

She likes his mindless touches, the ones that aren't supposed to mean anything. They make her tremble and think about his fine white hands, their remarkably slender fingers, better for piano playing than even her own.

But he doesn't really like music. He likes the quiet, and the sound of his breathing coming quick as he brings his sword over and across in gleaming white arcs.

The moment she presses down on the white keys of her new piano, she is struck still, thinking about her father, first kisses and flames licking warm and deep just like first kisses. The piano breathes at her, and a note fades deep into the house.

It occurs to her that Cloud must've been thinking about the flames too, the very moment she ever mentioned playing piano again. She walks away from it, actually pushes it out to the backyard while he isn't home.

"I could feel the heat of the fire, when I sat down on the bench." She says a couple hours later when she's turning the lights out in the bar. He's a hunched dark shape in the stairwell, and the streetlight colors his white cheek, makes the blue of his eye almost green.

"Bring it back in. You…like music." He says, and his voice stretches out deep and awkward, touches her face, legs.

"Yes but…" she bites her lip, "I don't like ghosts."

"Do any of us?" he asks, and she wants to say, _you do, Cloud, you do, don't you?_

"I'll get rid of it." She says, thinking even though he wouldn't say it, it was clearly bothering him.

She let the piano sit there for a few nights, sit in their dark backyard. She ran out one night on the fresh legs of a nightmare still dissipating, she ran out to the backyard when she heard a heavy sweep of keys, found Denzel and Marlene playing around with it.

"Stop!" she'd yelled before she'd even known it was them. And they looked at her standing in her pajamas, hair all about, and those children, _those children_ could see the wild look in her eyes she couldn't shade down even though she realized _it was just the kids, playing, that's all, just the kids. _

But when they headed off towards their rooms, edged around her like she was an unpredictable thing, not quite the woman who scrambled eggs for them in the morning, she looked at the piano.

She looked at it and felt like she was on fire.

In that instant, it started to snow.

She goes back to her room and tries to sleep, but only ends up opening her eyes back up to stare through her window. If she bends far enough, presses her nose against the glass, she can see the dark curved edge of the piano, nothing else. She stares at it, through the snow and through the night.

Stepping backward into her room, she casts a desperate look at one of Denzel's drawings she has tacked up on her wall. She tries to root herself in the present, but something is pulling her backwards, towards her coat and gloves, down the stairs and outside into the fresh, fallen snow.

It looks like a great beast in the dark, lacquered and black, still and audible in feather light undertones pulled up into the air by the ferocious wind. There is no melody, but there doesn't have to be for her to think about her father again, the girl she used to be, running around the cavernous halls of a mansion. Alone. She thinks of a blue ribbon she used to wear, a piece of sheet music fluttering to the floor, dark clouds rising high above the mountains, and a boy, _the boy_, she'd never actually see again.

They were both changed.

Cloud found her kneeling in the snow, crying into her mittens.

And it just seemed impossible that anything could've struck her like this. She was supposed to be strong. She said that to him when he crouched beside her, and dug his hands into the white snow. The snow in Edge was not as sharp or as clean as the kind in the mountains, and she thought about that when he took a handful of fresh snow and tossed it up into the air aimlessly, as if she wasn't there.

He didn't seem too impressed with it, and he shook his bare hands off, breathed a billowing white cloud of heat into the air.

"I wonder how much more of myself I've lost without knowing it." She said quietly, and he turned, looked at her, flakes clinging to his pale, blonde eyelashes.

"Yeah." He breathed. "Me too."

Tifa thought she should stop crying, unless she wanted her eyes to freeze shut, but she couldn't and she sprawled out into the snow, hair spilling out into a black tangle against the cold white. Cloud looked down at her, no stars in the sky behind him.

"Do you think we'll ever get those things back?" she asked, looking up at him. He looked at her for a long time, so long she noticed his freckles underneath the light of his eyes.

"No." he said quietly, and her heart stopped, "No I don't."

She turned away from him then, threw her arm out into the shadow of the piano. She didn't want to believe him. But he knew better than anyone, and so did she if she were ever to admit it, that in that moment he acknowledged the pieces of them they'd never get back, she saw him.

She saw him right there, pure and uninterrupted by ghosts, or dulled edges of old, rusted swords. And he looked like a boy, that boy who'd taken his pack and hiked to the nearest train station, and made promises to a girl underneath the stars.

But she wasn't that girl anymore, and the last real star she'd ever seen had been hurtling bright and deadly towards the planet.

She'd left so much there, in the starlight of a night of promises, in the firelight surrounding a small town, in the meteor light of a madman.

She looked up past the snowfall to the dark city sky. There was nothing there but black space, and she closed her eyes.

It was just about time someone put the lights out.

* * *

Author's Note: Wow, this was supposed to be a happy Cloti. Like a happy, nice, seasonal fluffy thing. And that…didn't happen. Well, next time I guess? I hope if you read you enjoyed.


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